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A Padded Room Of One's Own

'It's a marshmallow world in the winter,' Dean Martin used to sing. A few weeks after I had my first child, that song popped in my head one day, and I spent more than a few minutes imagining what a marshmallow world might really look like. While Dean was clearly referring to snow, I was momentarily fixated on the soft, puffy quality of marshmallows, and imagined being surrounded by their cushiony substance at every turn. I envisioned floors and walls and stairs made entirely of huge marshmallow squares. I didn't waste too much time on this endeavor: heavens knows how messy a marshmallow world really would be with rain and humidity, and dogs running around. So I moved on from imagining a marshmallow world to what I thought was the ever so slightly more practical option: a world made of Styrofoam. Styrofoam-encased cars with big Styrofoam bumpers, Styrofoam Jersey barriers, walls and floors made of Styrofoam or something similar to it. Even better, how about padded walls and cork floors in every home? Anything firm but soft enough that, if you fell on or against it, you wouldn't get hurt. I was starting to hate sharp corners and hard surfaces. Rectangular coffee tables. Concrete. Pavement. Ceramic floors. Brick. What was really happening, however, was that I was developing a postpartum disorder that would ravage my psyche in the months to come.

The house we were living in had ceramic floors and sharp edged furniture. It had a raised brick fireplace, long, steep concrete stairs abutting a brick wall out in the front, overlooking a sizeable drop to the driveway below. It wasn't safe, I concluded. I could drop the baby anywhere in this house with devastating results. I could fall down the front stairs or slip, causing the child grave injury. I covered the ceramic floors with rugs. Soon, I thought, my son would be crawling. I bought 'bumpers' for the living room tables: big, ugly, awkward padded things that stretched around the tables edges for extra cushion. I took deep breaths and played counting games coming up and going down stairs with him. I bought meditation tapes to help me calm down.

My anxiety intensified as the days went on. It started with this fear of falling and spiraled out of control from there. What if I lost my mind? I began to ask myself. What if I opened the window and threw the baby out? I Crazyglued all the second story window screens shut, except the ones that were so old and rusty they wouldn't open on their own

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